Single Quotes (page 31)
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At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one... not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place... in addition, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings. All this was accomplished so surreptitiosly, it attracted little public notice.
George Saunders
PRELIMINARY EXERCISE:
What does a turbine veil? a bird avail what chord?
I heard a bird whir no word, felt
a turbine shadow turning from the floods of time
electric currents the darkness stirrd,
and trees in blaze of light arose
casting shadows of speech, seductive, musical, abroad.
It was a single tree. It was a word of many trees
that filld the vale.
It was a store of the unspoken in the bird
that whirrd the air, that every occasion of the word
overawed.
Robert Duncan
I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, 'Let's face it.
Flannery O'Connor
People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for... They don't find it," I answered. And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."Of course," I answered. And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the light of her son's comment she reconsidered the scene at the mosque, to see whose impression was correct. Yes it could be worked into quite an unpleasant scene. The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs Callendar was nice, and then - finding the ground safe - had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the...
E. M. Forster
We’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.
Barack Obama
Always chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into only a fragment; always in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being; and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his nature he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his business or science
Friedrich Schiller